NEW ORLEANS REQUIEM

With Mardi Gras only a week away and the annual convention of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences just arriving in town, New Orleans Chief Medical Examiner Andy Broussard and psychological profiler Kit Franklyn match wits with a killer who stabs his victims, slices off one eyelid, and arranges them each with a telltale strand of hair, a row of Scrabble tiles—K, O, J, E, the first murder is signed—and a different section from the February 14 edition of the Times-Picayune. Forensic evidence marks the murderer as one of the specialists attending the conference (could it be Jason Harvey, the ``forensic whore'' who testified against Andy in a well-publicized case?), but doesn't indicate how the killings are tied to a Picayune story about the Heartbeats, a hospital-based band that broke up ten years ago. Donaldson seems to have dropped the thrills and chills of Blood on the Bayou (1991) and Cajun Nights (1988) for a more ingenious, though equally implausible, procedural mode. This one is for those who like their lab talk down and dirty.